A step closer to personalized software

Solitaire Alone Together recently hit the front page of Hacker News and it's delightful. I remember playing Solitaire a lot as a kid on the family computer, but I was terrible. Now that I'm older, it's a lot of fun, and quite addicting!

I found myself drifting back to it time and again while working, as it's the perfect fidget game to play while I'm in a meeting: it doesn't require lots of focus, I'm not tempted to check Slack which causes me to tune out, and I can pause anytime. Unfortunately, Zscaler now recognizes it as a gaming website and it's blocked on my work laptop. Bummer.

Then I wondered: how simple would it be to make an Android version of the game? Solitaire is a well-trod system. Let me try making my own version with Claude Opus 5.5:

Create a Solitaire game for the Android. Make it so that it's got all the convenience features, including a draw one and a draw three mode. Make sure that it has an undo button. Make sure the visual design is appealing and usable with one hand on the phone. Make sure the UX is slick. Make sure it has the option to turn sound on and off. Make it snappy and highly performant.

After adding some graphics on the face cards, polishing the settings menu, and tweaking some button placement, I've got a pretty solid mobile game!

The best part is, I did all of this from my phone. Launching the Claude app, publishing to a GitHub repo, downloading the .apk, installing and playing testing all happened without touching a computer.

I've pondered what personalized software will look like, and this is one step closer. Even as I write this post (on a computer), I haven't bothered checking the Play Store for Solitaire apps. I know there's thousands of them, but I didn't want to wade through the muck of ads, addictive hooks like daily streaks, flashy graphics, leaderboards, or any other junk. I prompted Claude when I arrived at the gym, tweaked it between sets, and was playing a fully-featured game by the time I left. 

You can play it yourself by downloading the .apk if you'd like. I toyed with the idea of publishing to the Play Store myself, but it was too much work.